← Back to context

Comment by IshKebab

4 days ago

I spoke to a Taiwanese person and apparently the salaries there are actually quite good, even by western standards (normal ones; not SF). The downside is they have very very long hours (996, barely any holiday, etc.).

29 comments

IshKebab

Reply
jonas21  4 days ago

It's also highly-skilled, yet very boring work. The way it was described to me is that every major piece of equipment has a PhD assigned to it and their job is basically to babysit the machine and troubleshoot when things go wrong.

US PhDs typically have other options and would consider this sort of work a waste of their time.

  • bear141  4 days ago

    I know several people working as customer engineers in a fab based in America. They are very much not PhD‘s or even mechanical engineers.

    They are each assigned one tool to maintain as you said. They each make around 100K and 3 12hr days per week.

    They were working in the automotive industry before these jobs. Sounds pretty damn good to me, but I suppose that’s one reason American companies cannot compete with TSMC.

  • rcpt  4 days ago

    I have a math PhD and a number of my colleagues went on to finance jobs which they described as "babysit an algorithm"

  • JumpCrisscross  4 days ago

    > every major piece of equipment has a PhD assigned to it and their job is basically to babysit the machine and troubleshoot when things go wrong

    This works in Taiwan. It doesn’t in America. The Taiwanese workers will help transfer knowledge to American workers; it will be the joint responsibility of them both to come up with how those processes are adapted for American preferences. (Probably more automation, rotation between machines or possibly even not being under TSMC.)

    • neltnerb  4 days ago

      I mean, that was exactly the way the job was described when I interviewed at Intel for a process engineer, and everyone doing the same job was at the time a PhD according to the interviewer. Did it change?

      Being on call 24/7 to troubleshoot million dollar pieces of equipment sounded like a poor life choice, so I didn't take it. But Intel also hasn't exactly done great since then...

      1 reply →

  • chasd00  4 days ago

    > The way it was described to me is that every major piece of equipment has a PhD assigned to it...

    did they mean that literally or just that an expert was assigned to it? What kind of PhD would even be relevant to maintaining machinery on an assembly line? Perhaps a PhD on the operations of that specific machine but even then, the person's knowledge would be so focused on whatever physics/chemistry/science is being used that i find it hard to believe a PhD would know what to do when something broke without tons of specific training on the hardware.

    • scarab92  4 days ago

      A PhD is really just a project in an academic setting.

      There’s likely little real world difference in capability between someone with first class honours and a year in industry, than first class honours plus a PhD.

      1 reply →

kkylin  4 days ago

Not just long hours right? Speaking to Taiwanese friends involved in semiconductor work (not TSMC employees though) it's the shift work that's really hard to manage in the US.

johnnyanmac  4 days ago

50k is/was recently a decent salary (not SF). In the last 5 years, not so much anywhere outside the absolute lowest CoL areas.

But yes, most Americans do not want to work on a death march. And employers don't want to pay it. I doubt they can argue 50k as exempt so that's a lot of overtime. They may as well be salaried 6 figures at that point.

867-5309  4 days ago

996..? doesn't fit into weeks, months or years